Welcome to Blaenau Ffestiniog!

Right behind the Snowdon Stations, you’ll find the Blaenau Ffestiniog Stations. This thrilling game is designed specifically for 1 to 4 players like you.

Getting Started

I’m going to shuffle things up a bit for you. Place the Blaenau Ffestiniog station right on top of the Llanberis space on the board, then set up the rest of the route as usual. We won’t need Contract cards 28 and 29 this time around, so you can remove them from the game.

Everything else stays the same – the resources in the Supply Bag, the action spaces, the weather – except for a few changes:

Starting with the Start Player and going clockwise, each player gets to choose where they want to begin – either Blaenau Ffestiniog or Porthmadog harbor. Place your Surveyor pawn in one of the three spaces at the bottom of the card to mark your starting position.

Keep in mind that there are only three spaces available for Surveyor pawns on both Blaenau Ffestiniog and Porthmadog harbor. So, if there are four players, one of them won’t have a choice and will have to go where there’s room.

When it’s my turn to place my Surveyor, I get to choose where to put one of the game’s Game markers. I can pick either Blaenau Ffestiniog or Porthmadog Harbor as the location for my Surveyor. This marker represents the Surveyor, who will move between these two places as the game progresses.

I also need to put an Event cube on space 7 of the Events Track. We’ll only use spaces 8, 9, and 10 on this track. From the beginning of the game, we can use the Build Action to start building trains.

While Playing

Excavate and Lay Track Actions

When we take the Excavate or Lay Track actions, we each perform these actions along the route in the direction away from our starting positions.

Once all the rubble counters have been cleared from Station 4, the event called ‘Train maintenance is needed’ will occur.

Build Action

When I decide to build, I take the following steps:

Let me tell you about track cards and station cards in the game. First, I want to mention that you don’t have to dig up track cards before building a station card. You can build a station card right on top of a track card. Pretty cool, right?

Now, there’s something important you need to know. You can only build on station cards starting from your initial position and moving forward until you reach the location of your surveyor. If you don’t move your surveyor, well, you won’t be able to build sites anywhere else. So, it’s a good idea to keep that surveyor moving!

Oh, and here’s a neat trick. Some station cards give you free resources when you build on a non-excavation site. If there are resources available in the supply bag, you get them for free! If not, well, you won’t get anything. But hey, free stuff is always exciting, right?

Now, let’s talk about the surveyor action. When you move your surveyor away from Blaenau Ffestiniog or Porthmadog Harbor, you need to put one of your ownership markers in your starting station. This shows that’s your new starting position. Now, keep in mind that all players will have one less ownership marker to use in the game if they decide to move their surveyor.

Alright, now let’s move on to what happens when an event occurs in the game. Exciting stuff, I promise!